Nihilist Morality

Objective morality means nihilist morality. And that's fine. Partly because everything is fine, but mainly because logic is irrevocable, so even nihilism has rules.

Basic nihilism: nothing is necessary, everything is permitted. 

However, this means whim implies ought. If you want X, you ought to commit act Y which leads to X.

Since all whims are valid, some whims are not valid: the ones that are explicitly about invalidating someone else's whims. "I don't want a cookie, I just want you to not have a cookie." This whim invalidates the justifying principle, and thus logically invalidates itself. The principle says I ought to make you ought not do what you ought to do. Bzzzt. If it is okay for me to suppress your whim, it must likewise be okay for you to suppress my whim, in particular the whim about suppressing your whims, and thus my whim is self-delegitimizing. If it's false it's false and if it's true it's false. In all cases, false. Strictly speaking such things are not whims at all.

When I say my course is Right and Moral and Good, I contradict the [everything is permitted] clause, and thus invalidate my own validation. "It is Wrong for you have cookies." Put colloquially, anyone saying you ought not to do something because it's selfish ought to be punched in the face until they shut up. This also applies to your own whims invalidating your own whims.  

Because cooperation is always rational, cooperation is always possible, and defection can be very clearly defined: the act of trying to make cooperation be seen as irrational. In practice it's always possible to bake enough cookies to satisfy both of us. Defection is attempting to nevertheless dissatisfy one of us, which encourages everyone who is being actively dissatisfied to declare war and destroy the defector.

Lies are also self-condemning in this way. "I'm not going to take a cookie," as a strategy for getting a cookie. "Getting this cookie requires saying I shouldn't get this cookie." Bzzzt. "It is right for you to oppose this whim." Okay, will do. When you support the opposite of what you're doing, you invalidate your own course of action. Or: Kant was onto something but didn't quite make it.

In both cases remove the whim causing the problem; invalidate it. It doesn't count as a real whim. Remember, ought implies can. Whims that are unsatisfiable also don't count. "I want to eat every cookie in the world."

Nevertheless, objective morality still isn't real objectivity. The point of objectivity is to stop arguing about it. Take out the ruler, get a measurement. Here, it is impossible. There's a bunch of finesse involved. Technically anyone can argue that a yard stick isn't a yard long, but in practice that's stupid. For morality, it should be stupid but almost never is.

Because there are limited resources, it's easy to cast someone's whim as invalidating your whim, even if it inherently does no such thing. "I want six of the ten cookies, therefore your desire for five of the cookies invalidates my desire." It's not like starting with eleven cookies was logically impossible.

Similarly, even if we had nice objective rules about that, it would be easy to do the opposite, and cast a whim-invalidating whim as merely a resource-competition whim. "I'm not trying to starve you of cookies, I just want all ten, that's all, see..." It's not like starting with fifteen cookies was impossible, but we already didn't do that, creating a loophole. More generally, it would have been possible for humans to evolve such that they're fully satisfied as a set without requiring more resources than exist, but that already didn't happen.

As a practical matter it is necessary to decide beforehand on bright lines which demarcate trespass. Property lines, if you will. Boundaries, even. "These are my cookies, so they go to who I say they go to. If you don't like it, bake your own." However, it must be possible to argue with the boundaries. It is possible, indeed easy, to create a positive right - property ownership over a whim to directly suppress someone else's whim. "I don't have my own oven so I get to bake my cookies in yours if you're not using it." You just want to be alone today but it's "trespass" not to let me invade your house and dirty your oven.

But, because property must be arguable, it can go in the reverse direction. Toward more defection, instead of more cooperation. Maybe at first I had to pay you a cookie tax to use the oven, but now I get to use your oven even if you were using it first and sit on your couch watching your TV. Easy to argue that a rent is actually a subscription. 

This is why it's necessary to have Exit. To be able to unilaterally (but forthrightly) declare someone a non-cooperator, and thus absolve yourself of the requirement to cooperate with them. This is still fuzzy, but Exit, at least, must be perverted to do bad, rather than requiring perversion to do good. The slippery slope points in a responsible, cooperative direction.

Major Moldbug Error, Salus Populi Addendum

The Romans wanted cruel leaders. That hasn't changed. Europeans still want cruel leaders, the crueller the better. Only some layering has changed. They want sophisticated cruel leaders who cleverly hide their sadism. No more blood and skulls and fire. The idea is to make someone suffer as badly as if they had full-body burns, without physically touching them. Ideally, make them think it was their own fault. Or perhaps make them think it's actually a good thing and their suffering is appearing from nowhere. (E.g. welfare.)

Making the populace healthy isn't cruel. 

If the food pyramid were some kind of isolated event, perhaps mere public choice theory would explain it. Instead the populace will fight you if you try to debunk the food pyramid, and that goes for everything. It's all cruel lies and sadistic falsehoods, and it's exactly what they demand.

Any form of health-supporting sovereign would suffer immediate and overwhelming violent insurrection.

Abstract Theorizing is Metaphysics

It bears repeating.

So you've noticed you can't justify your moral intuitions. (Nihilism is true, naturally you can't.) You can't possibly do anything as silly as adjust your ideology, that would be admitting you were wrong about something. Instead have to figure how to make sure nobody notices. (Paging Sailer...) Anyway, the point is to make friends, right? You can make lots of friends by conspicuously avoiding the whole justification issue, since they've noticed the same thing and don't want to deal with it any more than you do. When we choose to use a word, it means what we want it to mean, neither more nor less, and that's that! Plus, if you adjust your ideology, it won't be the same ideology as all your friends anymore. You might become less popular.

Justifying your moral intuitions is abstract theorizing, which is metaphysics. (Naturally, noticing this equivalence is also metaphysics.) 

Metaphysics isn't real. Every modernist says so, it must be true. 

Thus we say nobody should think abstractly if there is any way to avoid it.

And thus we can call ourselves nihilist without having to suffer the inconvenience of knowing what nihilism is. Handy!

 

Also, if you had any fucking clue what you were talking about, then you'll make the clueless feel envy and jealousy. That's morally wrong.

Nihilism and Other Moldbug Errors

Moldbug lacks discipline. Moldbug's work stands as stupidity cancellation, used for defence against change. Moldbug, ironically, is a menshevik. 

How "right" wing you are in the modern world is largely down to how much cognitive dissonance you can stomach. If it's unlimited you join the Democratic Party or any of its various suppurating pustules, feasting heartily on the seepage. If slightly limited, the Republican Party. If distinctly limited, you read Moldbug. It would seem no level of intolerance is enough to genuinely take responsibility for your own life.

Moldbug lacks discipline and his popularity reassures you. You, too, have no need for discipline. Moldbug says, "Oh no, you haven't made a mistake. You read Moldbug after all! You're fine! It's all -those- poor idiots who have made a mistake."

Lacking discipline, Moldbug failed to question his assumptions. He claimed to be a nihilist, but doesn't know exactly what a nihilist is and thus can't tell he isn't one. 

I believe I have found the fundamental theorem of nihilism. It is this: life is a luxury. There is no such thing as a necessity. Die if you want, it's fine. Or live, that's okay too. If everyone chooses to drink their morning coffee and then walk off into the ocean, so what? (See also: Hume. Since everything is a luxury, there are only two reasons to pick one luxury over another. First, some of your whims are more durable than others. Second, your whims conflict and you can only choose decisions, not their consequences. You can postulate a God of Creation if you like, but it is not a relevant variable. Whether it's a caring universe, a Gnon, or a dead mechanical clockwork, you still can choose your decisions, but not their consequences. Indeed this principle binds even Gnon. Yahweh can choose not to put a Fence around the Tree, but then Adam eats from it.) A non-nihilist is someone who believes some of their whims are Necessary, which means anyone who does not share this special non-whim whim is lying or a devil or an Adversary or something. Basically they are fascinated and enthralled by their ingroup/outgroup reflex, exactly as a porn addict is enthralled by pictures of boobs.

Occult knowledge: theft is never necessary, outside of a true famine where there is no bread to steal. (My whim is to disdain segues.) Even if we pretend [life = luxury] is false, you can always earn it. Theft is never rational; you don't get more to eat and it makes enemies. Occult knowledge: you are your ancestors. 

If you think you need to replace the government, it's you that fucked up, (or your ancestors, who are you), not the government. Cities burning down? You dun fukked up. The government is getting what it wants. Certainly, you will form the whim to blame the government. Will it help? Have you tried it before? 

If the government is smart you don't need to outsmart it; cooperating with it is rational. If the government is dumb, then defecting on it isn't hard. Don't play its stupid game, it only offers stupid prizes. It's not your government. You can tell because you can't sell it. The pain is self-inflicted. Anyone happily buying into stupid games is prey; they should and will be eaten as such. (Only question: whether it's you or your enemies who will be doing the eating.)

Government for the people is impossible. The leader always leads for the leader's sake.
Government by the people is impossible. Also, circles don't have corners, bachelors don't have wives, and the sun does not rise at dusk.

In further shocking news, politicians lie. There is nothing to be recovered from what they say. If you are not discarding it you are building your foundation on the fossils of past (coercive, defective) power grabs. "Yes massa, can I have another." Is your whim to be a slave? It's fine, that's okay too. 

 

You don't care about The People. It is not your whim. I'm not going to let you pretend it is. No one else cares either. Any system which depends on caring about salus populi is a lie. Lies are bad, mmmkay. It makes enemies and you don't get any more to eat. E.g, it makes Gnon your enemy. 

 

Carl Sagan was a politician and it's probably fine to nuke the crap out of each other. Millions of strangers die of preventable causes every year. A nuclear war would be some of them. You haven't cared before and I'm not going to let you pretend to care now. (Reasonably preventable suffering constitutes some 97% of all suffering.) If you think a bomb might land on your own head, try standing somewhere else?

Special mention for [abstract theorizing, always the worst possible way to think]. In other words, "I can't think, therefore you can't think." The Dao is all one thing. Any attribute which inheres to abstract theorizing inheres to all thought. Empirical experiment is a kind of abstract theorizing. Anyone who cannot profit by thinking about abstract models cannot profit by experiment either; the errors you need to see are the same in both cases. This is Government by Steam, Moldbug Ver. E.g. if you don't remember to define nihilism before you call yourself a nihilist, you will also forget to define things like [prediction], [measure], and [result]. 

Speaking of assumptions, [we want the experience to be as dramatic and significant as possible]. Significant => significant to other humans => more significant to other humans than the other humans are => to be high status => to defect and not get punished. (Chicks dig defectors and the dimorphism barrier is leaky.) To define salus populi as this is to say that the health of the populace is for each individual to make the rest of the population unhealthy. I would /facepalm but I was expecting this level of brain damage. 

Of course, if you want to live a society based on a repaired version of this principle, that's fine. That's okay too. It will be terribly violent; you cannot choose the consequences. I personally would like to see a city where the only illegal act is making sidewalks and rooms flat. Ban easy terrain. (Imagine not trying it on the whole country at once.) I don't personally need death to be a likely outcome of failure, but some are degenerate or simplistic enough to need it. Being degenerate is, of course, okay. That's fine too.

Further, [that the indiscriminate pursuit of utility]. Nope. Not indiscriminate. E.g. you have to believe [life is sacred] or rather that death is profane. That anyone with a ""death" "wish"" is a liar or a devil or an Adversary or whatever. That nothing is more "valuable" than satisfying the whim of continuing to live. It is precisely due to the failure to be nihilist, not the sublimation of nihilism. 

[Is this progress? Soldiers are no longer pierced by steel. Sailors are no longer drowned rounding the Horn.] Many have whims of this nature, but they are largely illegal. Can't even have Roman gladiators. Play stupid games. 

Moldbug being literally Communist. [This policy is very simple: toy control. The rule is: all new children’s toys sold in any country must be handmade, from natural materials, by subjects of that country.] Lots and lots and lots of real jobs left undone, and Moldbug can't think of a single one of them. Paint the concrete. Replace the concrete with wood and paint that instead. Get the gum off the sidewalks. Strip off all the bad graffiti. Add more good graffiti. Etc, etc, etc, etc. Moldbug's solution to the lack of purpose is fake jobs? Brain damage. Lies are bad.

But no no it's okay! You don't need to stop lying. Moldbug lies through his teeth all the time and he's popular. As we all know, being popular is the essence of being Good. (High status; to defect and get away with it.) You just needed a better class of lies, unlike those stupid low-status proles. I bet they don't even try to be popular. What losers. Such outgroup. Many immoral.

Moldbug doesn't think of any of these undone jobs because his true purpose is not salus populi. His whim is to keep the proles properly oppressed and humiliated, like they deserve. He will look dramatic and significant by comparison. Uses the classic Fascist trick of calling a thing its opposite, and says dehumanization is the solution to dehumanization.

Democracy is the theory that we can dehumanize the peasants if we pretend the peasants are dehumanizating themselves. MoldbuGuilds is the theory we can dehumanize the peasants if they're tricked into thinking they're not being dehumanized. Laugh into your hand, they won't notice a thing.

Both to go above the human and below the human is dehumanizing. [Breaking one’s own windows is antisocial and deranged. Making one’s own toys is not antisocial or deranged. If you cannot tell the difference, Horatio...] Getting out ahead of the obvious true counter-point isn't he? (This is accounting denialism. Accounting is boring. It takes discipline to appreciate it.)

Conceivably try decriminalizing lemonade stands before we try Full Communism again, yeah? 

...you know chemistry sets used to be toys for children, right? And now they're banned? Just possibly, the fact the legal toys are made in faraway places isn't the problem here. Pretending this is the problem is a way of not looking at the problem, which you avoid because you already know what you would see if you looked. 

It would seem no level of intolerance for cognitive dissonance is enough to genuinely take responsibility for your own life. 

Which is correct, because you are a peasant. 

Peasants never fully mature. They need a Lord to take care of them, or they will not be taken care of. Perhaps you want Moldbug as your Lord? He does not appear to be taking serf applications. And why would he? How does a Lord profit by taking on more dependants? Anyway he would just force you to make toys by hand, as opposed to mastering the trade and doing it as effectively as you can grasp. Maybe reconsider.

Oversimplified recent history of the world:
Peasants: "We want to run our own lives!"
Lords: "Haha! Okay! Have fun with that!"
Peasants: "Oh no! Holocaust! Holodomor! All our cities are burning down!"
Lords: *snrk*

Fun physiognomic fact: Stalin had multiple deformities. He was born to a impoverished father who couldn't even manage to love his own children. His country (that which he could have sold if he wanted) was unhealthy. Surprising! Are you surprised? ([Impoverished] means [rebellious against Gnon].)

Knowledge as Justified True Belief: Repaired

To fix the [justified true belief] definition of, simply alter [justified] to [stable]. Lack of justification is one source of instability but hardly the only one. 

A guess is unstable because you're apt to second-guess yourself, even if the guess is accurate the first time.

A Gettier case is unstable because even though one of your beliefs is accurate, 99% of apparently identical beliefs are inaccurate and if you interact with them you're also apt to change your true belief. (Camouflage is possible but that doesn't mean knowledge is impossible.)

A false belief is unstable, no matter how well justified, because you're apt to learn better.

Theme: I'm an Idiot

Immigration powers Democracy's envy engine, and the point of Fascism's gender skew is to uphold egalitarianism. Only an idiot wouldn't have figured this out sooner.



The iron law of oligarchy is true, and democracies are run by an elite oligarchy. Typically a top-out-of-sight oligarchy whose names never show up in the news. Indeed becoming visible, especially in such a gauche way, results in their rivals ganging up on them and casting them out of the inner circle.

It is hard to see how this oligarchy benefits from immigration. Cheap labour? What, you pay for your own workers? What a rube. Sheer Impact, making the peasants unhappy? Too weak. They work diligently in pursuit of greater immigration. Votes? Err, iron law of oligarchy, my dude.

But, duh, democracy is an envy engine. It is founded on envy of the elites and continues to function on the envy of the lower classes for the middle classes. Thus, a strong democracy has the largest possible lower class. Hence, the idea is to import as many partial failures as possible. Import those who envy the natives, and create a vigorous, healthy envy cycle.

The constant talk about racism is there to intensify the envy. Nobody claims that being good at written school tests isn't important. They instead constantly throw the difference in test scores in the lower classes' faces. They get away with this by pretending that they're condemning some poor scapegoat for causing it. Standard Fascism point 3.

The votes and impact are nice bonuses, though. Why satisfy one goal when you can go 3-for-1?



Speaking of Fascism, I said, "The gender skew is plain weird." It's not, of course. Fascism is fundamentally fundamentalist egalitarian theocracy.

Egalitarianism doesn't work, and that's the point. Nobody is stupid enough to genuinely believe that men and women aren't different. Egalitarianism is all about throwing those differences in everyone's faces by bringing them up all the time, but pretending that they're caused by malign actors instead of caused by impersonal reality. (Firing the envy engine and distracting the peasants from Fascism's failures.) Only a bad person wouldn't believe in egalitarianism, and thus everyone pretends as hard as they can.

Naturally this means pretending men are women or pretending women are men. Hence, masculine or feminine Fascism. Women/men are only allowed to be part of the clerisy/government if they can convincingly pretend to be men/women.

It's not easy; to make it easier, the voters are encouraged to be as androgynous as possible. Sin is in all of us, and we must fight it daily, lest we fall. Having a man acting all manly next to a female governor would throw her inability to be masculine into sharp relief. The peasants might have inegalitarian thoughts. Heresy! No leading the flock astray!

Libotascracy

Feudalism - individualism - Sith

Communism - collectivism - Jedi

Responsibility vs. irresponsibility. Ownership vs. non-ownership.

--

Every Jedi is merely a Sith which is lying about being Jedi. They seek personal power in pursuit of their individual selfish emotions. Every communist is a feudal lord who lies about their goals and intentions as a way of forestalling resistance. Collectivism is individualism with extra illusionary steps. There is thus a sense in which the political spectrum is in fact a horseshoe. Every communist wishes to create, ultimately, a perfect feudal order where they, individually and personally, own everything.



The Jedi order is merely a complex way of obfuscating these intents and laundering these efforts. You can tell for sure; while an attempt to incarnate one's will is not necessarily successful, a failed attempt can always be abandoned. Thus, when we see a Jedi council largely succeeding in an attempt to set itself up as a coercive, deviant authority, the fact they do not abandon this council demonstrates coercive authority was their original intent.

When a communist finds themselves making gulags, they do not abandon the initiatives that required gulags. When they hide the gulag, they admit the gulag is a sin; it is not ignorance. It is a proper incarnation of their original intent. The communist wishes to enslave and thus own every subject; any that refuse to be enslaved by words will be enslaved by chains.

Collectivism is supposed to be the proposition that if two intents conflict, there doesn't have to be a winner. If a 'collective' owns a house, in reality some distinct individual owns the collective and thus, by proxy, the house.



Certainly a country can make it illegal to sell a plot of land without the whole family's permission, but ultimately this means the country owns the land and it's LARPing something else. It's nothing but a roundabout way of preventing the nominal owner from selling it.

Rules like these make objects much easier to steal. Since the land's owner is in fact the collective's owner, but nobody is allowed to admit to owning the collective, the owner isn't allowed to explicitly secure their shit. It becomes possible to steal the land without the original owner even being aware of the transfer of ownership until they try to do something to the land.

Similarly, while the owner can sell the house they don't necessarily get the money. Usually requires a bunch of extra steps. Both lower the owner's profits, and the missing wealth goes to waste.



The point of being a Jedi is to forestall realization that you're Sith. The point of being communist is to prevent others from owning the things you want to own, and to forestall the realization that you've appropriated it all. The point of being a collectivist is to steal things from the nominal owner. They are all inherently fake. They are all methods of owning things without having to take responsibility for owning them. They are theft with extra steps; ideally the original owner still thinks they own it and will pay for the maintenance on your behalf.



However, completing the spectrum wraparound is impossible, on sheer information grounds. To own something is to control it. Entropy can own something. If I have every de jure power over something, but de facto cannot issue orders about it, then entropy is the de facto owner.

There is a limited bandwidth which I can physically issue, and as a result, I, like any individual, can only own a distinctly limited subset of all property.
In the cases where I claim de jure ownership but cannot in fact own it, at best it is owned by entropy. Much more likely it is owned by some other individual, who can now irresponsibly blame their own errors on me.

You must own your food at the moment you eat it. If I manage, somehow, to properly and personally own all the food, everyone else will starve to death. Even though I would own a farm, I don't own the knowledge of working the farm and thus I would also starve to death. Everyone is equal in death. Everyone is equal only in death. Communism is a lethal disease.



The point of all forms of tyranny is irresponsible ownership. To build things without having to work. To get into fights without being at risk. All tyrants are deviant and deviant governance is tyranny.

Easiest Engineering Discipline

Myth: social engineering is impossible.

Reality: social engineering is the easiest engineering discipline.

Classical physics is in fact a special case of quantum physics. In large numbers, all the weird randomness cancels out and you're left with a bit of algebra. Similarly, predicting a single person (especially at range) is extraordinarily difficult, but with large numbers the divergences average out to be particularly simple.

Helpfully, the Russians checked this hypothesis for us. The KBG ran around executing elaborate plans engineering controlled demolitions of other societies. Sociology is so easy they didn't even need to prototype. It just worked.

The myth comes from progressives, as modern myths are wont to do.

Since sociology is easy, the negative effects of progressive reforms were all predicted in advance. Minimum wages killed employment, especially among the poor. Affirmative action led to the 'beneficiaries' becoming violent, degenerate fops. 'Emancipating' women destroyed the family. Etc. etc. If you had to wait for the proof of the calculation problem to know that communism would be a catastrophic failure, you were an idiot.

But, for obvious reason that I'll nevertheless belabour, progressives lie about it. (Recall the difference between lay proggies and the leadership.) They do these things because it benefits them. Since they are perceived to be evil and are in fact comically destructive, proggies are can't be upfront about it. Nevertheless, you can tell the policies are working as intended because they're never rolled back.

Further, for the same reason, you can tell that for the most part it's a plan and purpose. While certainly there are prospiracy aspects to the progressive parasite regime, for the most part sociology is easy so they plan and then it just works.

When minimum wage laws destroy the dignity of lower class neighbourhoods, they become dependent on the government for survival. To paraphrase a certain fungous insect, if you own a man's livelihood there's one thing you've certainly bought - his vote. Proggies outlawed marriage because married women are far more likely to vote on the right. Proggies opened holes for illegal immigration because, even setting aside the vote thing, a suspicious, distrustful population is far easier to divide and conquer. Indeed the whole immigration thing comes with its own built-in division. Saves time on cutting new ones. Letting homosexuals out of the closet destroys male companionship, thus men must turn to the government. In case you think this is just a gay coincidence, in areas where sodomites can't be used to dismantle male camaraderie, heavy-handed persecution is applied. If military history can't be made fruity or boring enough, then funding for curricula and departments is simply cut, and amateur societies are brought before kangaroo courts.

If it were some kind of blind groping there should be policies that accidentally harm progressives. These failed initiatives should be rolled back. In practice, Cthulu always swims left. There have been rollbacks but because of overreach, not because the policies ever threatened progressive hegemony.

The peasants have the attitudes the progressives want them to have. If they don't behave exactly as progressives want them to, it's due to failure of will. The progressives prefer to be the most hip and fashionable in any case, so this is more feature than bug.